This Carmen won't seduce anyone

Since the success of her 1992 film Orlando, says Sally Potter, she has had a policy of 'saying no to every offer to direct a film, commercial or opera.' When ENO's artistic director, John Berry, invited her to direct Carmen, it took Potter a year to change her mind and accept. One can only wish she had stuck to her original policy, and taken five minutes to turn him down. In her astonishingly arrogant programme notes, Potter describes herself as 'a risk-taking perpetual outsider' who might as well 'dive into' the operatic repertoire at its heart. So 'mainstream' a work has been 'done' so often that a radical approach 'cannot possibly harm it.'

Wrong. Potter's radical approach manages the almost impossible task of robbing Bizet's masterpiece of its very essence - its passion, its beauty, its sensuality, its central argument about the right of any human being to assert her independence. Because Bizet never visited Spain, says Potter, the work need not be set there. Because ENO sings opera in English, it must be set in England. Contemporary England, natch.

So Carmen's cigarette factory becomes a hi-tech security firm, in which Don Jose is a senior suit, with lots of girls rushing in and out for no apparent reason, absurdly crying 'Call the cops!' in Christopher Cowell's outrageously loose translation. All the action so audible in the music is removed from the stage, where it belongs, and transferred to closed-circuit TV images, which soon get forgotten as all the dancing is symbolically transferred to one spangly couple hogging the stage at all the wrong moments. No wonder Carmen at first fails to seduce Jose; having offered to dance for him, she idles against the wall, attempting to smoulder a la Bacall while this acutely irritating couple dance in her place. Even I would have made an excuse and left, pleading that I was 'letting down' the lads. For all the smoky beauty of Alice Coote's sultry mezzo, a less sexy Carmen I have never seen.

The smugglers become sleazy wastrels, breaking no obvious laws as they cross a motorway bridge with those dancers beneath them, tangoing in mid-traffic. It is hard to surmise which UK border-post they might be approaching, wary of all of two customs officers. Not until the final act does Potter finally have to admit defeat and transport them all to Spain - even she cannot change the words of the 'Toreador Song' - where they fetch up, of course, as boorish English tourists.

ENO's new music director, Edward Gardner, conducts with all the brio the staging lacks. But he must share the blame with Berry for allowing Potter to discard all the dialogue, and turn one of the greatest works in the repertoire into an ugly, misbegotten aberration. In vain does Julian Gavin give the performance of his career as a magnificent Jose, with Katie Van Kooten a vibrato-heavy Micaela. Why Berry thinks film directors should offer opera more than a box-office boost - remember Anthony Minghella's puppeteer-cluttered Madame Butterfly? - remains a mystery. Beyond her cloth ear, which misses every stage nuance in the music, Potter has no sense of theatre. There is no tension, no spectacle, no edge. Anyone choosing this as their first opera will be put off for life.

No, debutants should join the cognoscenti at Nicholas Hytner's bewitching The Magic Flute, as witty and solemn by turns as Mozart's score, visually ravishing despite its clunky sets, shot through with charming detail and beguiling performances. This 12th outing, we are told, will be its last. ENO is killing off its best work just as it is introducing some of its worst in decades. (Think Satyagraha, think Kismet.)

New to the cast is Roderick Williams as the perfect Papageno, a North-country wide boy rewarded with a delightful Papagena in Susanna Andersson. Heather Buck is an unusually glamorous Queen of the Night, while Martin Andre conducts with panache and attention to detail. This wonderful evening is enough to restore the faith shattered by Potter's Carmen, despite the fact that Sarah-Jane Davies's Pamina and Andrew Kennedy's Tamino can sing rather better than they can act.